Say, I've been researching things like Open Source Insurgencies (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/) and Community Exchange Systems (http://www.ces.org.za/) and it seems to me the Blender Community is on the verge of evolving into something very much along those lines. So I'm posting to ask if someone is doing something like the suggestion below or if there is any interest in setting one up?

Briefly; The Community Exchange System is simply a secure system for tabulating credits and debits to individual accounts on the system. It is free to join and simple to use. For example, I get on Blender.org open projects forum and make a deal with a Musician to score my new demo reel. Musician does the work satisfactorily and delivers the proper files to me. I now access his account and credit him with the agreed upon amount of "Blender Bux" (or whatever you want to call them) automatically debiting my own account. Now he can spend that credit with another artist who has an account for, say, a keyboard he covets.

Now you already do this here, with freestuff and open projects, but in a very inefficient way. To make this activity "Open Source" you simply add a forum "Marketplace" where the various tasks of multiple projects are broken down and posted to be bid on by participants. Bids are accepted by posters and paid for with credits earned by doing work for others. All information is posted to the same forum and all transactions are transparent to the community at large. People who consistently fail to deliver on bids or to pay for work soon find offers drying up. Accounts allow negative balances to be carried so you can "buy in" on your promise to do work or deliver product to others. It's a barter system so no taxes are due on income.

The key to the success of such a system would be having, early on, a large enough pool of buyers/sellers so that there is something offered for everyone. Blender.org has thousands of members, if you add up the entire global 3D and CGI Arts community you are talking a potential membership in the millions.

If someone knows of anyone who is already doing something like this I'd like to find it and become a member. If not I would be happy to set one up if there happened to be a lot of interested parties?

Thanks Wild Doggy. OK, I've set up the account, once it is approved and operational I will announce it here. It will be called The "Digital Arts Community Exchange" and will be free to join and use. Interesting you should mention PHP cause I have little or no coding skill, though I do design websites using Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop. I'm thinking maybe a website that explains how it works and provides a forum to discuss stuff? What do you think?

Or would it be better to do it right here on this forum?

Remember the Star Trek Next Gen episode where Picard described Earth economy as no longer based on money? How they worked for "Favor" and "Prestige"? This would have a lot of similarity to that. You do someone a "Favor" by modeling a character for his demo reel, and he quantifies that as "credits" that you can exchange for "Favors" from others. If you do a poor job, or fail to deliver consistently, your "Prestige" falls in the community and you need to do more "Favors" in order to rebuild your "Prestige." Actually this "Open Projects" Forum does just that, all I am proposing is formalizing and quantifying the process. On the other hand, the "Favors" artists do each other on the Internet could probably be quantified in the millions of dollars a year, if it were valued at the same rate as freelance work...Anybody here read William Gibson?

Myself, as an artist I am fed up with the general attitude that you don't have to pay artists for their work. Perhaps this is a solution?

Sorry that I did not check up on this post as I should have, its war on the home front. (lots of school)

I just checked the "Notify me when a reply is posted" button so now I dont have to remember to check up.

This whole idea sounds great, and I propose an idea that you may not have thought about.

I am quite busy, BUT my computer, and the many random computers in my house are not. I don't think that I would be able to do much blending for a while but I could definitly do a lot of rendering. If rendering could be added to the products available that would be great, however, since it is such a cheap commodity, it may flood the market with "Blender Bux"

Wild Doogy

Oh, this is probably a great place to carry out the discussion until another place is ready to switch too.

Actually I went ahead and set it up and posted the link in another topic entitle "Digital Artists Community Exchange" which is also the name of the exchange, or "CACE" if you want to get acronymous...

Here's the link to the registration page. You may register for free at www.community-exchange.org, just choose DACE when asked which exchange you wish to join, You will also be asked to list your offers and wants, so give some thought to that before you sign up.

I don't think we'll get flooded with DACE dollars as everyone who participates will have motivation to keep them circulating, (They don't do you any good sitting there in your account.) The only problem would be in the beginning when you only have a few traders and there isn't a wide enough selection of stuff to trade. on the other hand imagine that you had 50 modelers, and 50 game designers, and 50 character creators and so on all signed up and itching to work. You could sign up a bunch of producers with storyboards who could start hiring people to create videos. Musicians to create the background, voice talent, for characterizations, code monkeys for specialized functions, plus you'd have a couple hundred high powered computers all hooked up to DSL 24x7. Artists could get paid for the use of their "idle time" for rendering. The more business you do the more "money' (D$) is in circulation. We already do this with shared projects, tutorials, and freebies, but no one is keeping records, so there is a certain amount of resentment from folks who hand out free stuff and never get acknowledged. This is quantifying your "prestige" with the community in a way that you can turn over into something useful. Say you post a tutorial. Every time it gets downloaded the downloader automatically credits you with 2D$, in time you have enough D$ accumulated to buy that 2gig memory that someone else is offering.

Let's face it "Free" isn't really free. People put a lot of work into their tuts and models, and what they get back is the growth and health of the general community which they can take part in. What DACE does is make that exchange explicit and efficient so everyone can participate.

Just noticed that the link has an extra comma on the end. For some reason the forum adds it to the hyperlink and it fails.

Also Check your first DACE it oopsed into a "C"

My grandfather is full of pithy sayings and one is:
"Free is too D*** expensive."

As I said before, great idea! and lets get it working.
I am reading a book on Google, and they started with a great idea in a garage. If this catches on, Google may may buy it for a couple of a million bucks